Parry doesn't cause an instant attack; it hastes your swing in progress. The wowwiki entry is current and correct, as far as I know. Instant spells for non shamans/paladins reset the swing timer, so if you attack at 3.0s, your next swing will occur 3.0s after you cast the spell.

Well, I just looked at the wowwiki parry entry, and am a bit miffed that someone completely obliterated the additions I'd made to it indicating the results I'd found doing my own parry tests and the 40% pro-rating.

This is a downside to a wiki. Any old schlub can destroy any evidence s/he wants to. I feel no need to repost the data and analysis now that I know what is likely to happen to it again.

EDIT: this particularly rankles me
/barf.

Well I know its a gear issue, but you should hopefully be farming Heroic Mana Tombs every day for the Totem drop off the first boss - literally takes 15 minutes or less with a well geared group. Your helm doesn't allow for a meta gem which could net you a 3% crit dmg gem, so thats just something to keep an eye out for later. Your armory shows a Violet Eye trinket equipped, hopefully you have something better than that?

Are you getting battle shout in your groups? You might consider moving some points out of 2H weapons, Improved Ghost Wolf and Healing Focus so that you can pick up Mental Quickness for a little more mana savings.

Otherwise it just may be an issue of certain fights where certain classes naturally do better, or you've got some serious rogues and mages who really light shit up. A well played rogue/mage *should always* out damage you as long as the fight doesn't preclude it in some way (CC, etc).

What is the other trinket you are using? I see a violet badge on armory at the time of this post- Also, you can farm the totem of Astral Winds from Heroic Pandemonius, as well as finding a new Helm (I think even desolation helm beats out Steelspine) and belt.

Really, I think that choosing our gear is just about the only thing that really matters for our dps- We have so few buttons to push, that anyone can hit a stormstrike and a shock on cooldowns. Only thing I can think of is to go for more rogue oriented pieces, like Gloves of Dextrous Manipulation in place of T4, Malefic Mask of the Shadows instead of Steelspine faceguard, etc.

The totem has not dropped yet, and the same for dps trinkets I've farmed. Simply bad luck.

As far as the other gear, my shaman has been my alt, and restricted on raid time and loot before others. Until we get one more Prot warrior in guild to replace me, I'm limited on winning items still. I was hoping it wasn't just gear realted and I could improve upon my playstyle. Thanks.

As to the pots vs flasks, I use the flasks still because we do have a decent amount of wipes. We only just cleared Vashj and Al'ar, so sometimes some of the encounters do result in some wiping (also B Rezzes and Reincarnations), making the Flasks more viable. When I know we're good on other encounters I usually run Agi with Mageblood.

Those are specifically for my Arena/BG's. While they do slow down my raid dps some, in the end I plan on getting the 97 dps axes for dual wielding, so it's a lil give and take. As to groups it's almost always myself, 3 rogues, and a feral druid. No BS at all.

You should really consider getting that fixed - Battleshout is a tremendous DPS boost to both rogues and Shaman.

And if you haven't been able to farm a trinket you should still get a bloodlust brooch, one of the best trinkets available.

Because your gear lacks stamina (yeah thats a crap response, but without seeing what you are wearing its hard to say anything more useful).

Int is fairly poor as a single stat, but having less than 8k mana buffed is getting to a situation where you will be wasting sham rage procs, have less ability to throw heals when needed and can run dry between sham rage cooldowns. That and the majority of raid guilds (can't prove this, but it seems to be true for more than its false) will prioritise leather to rogues/ferals while mail goes to enhance/hunters.

Hit is the 'worst' of the melee stats for enhance, its still of use, as the equivalency formula will show, but should not be prioritised over other stats which give us a larger dps gain.

However basically all of this has been said near a hundred times now, and people just keep coming back asking the same questions again. Especially the hit question is covered very well and a little reading would remove the need to have the same question over and over again.

Please don't do this.

Or especially this.

Fact is mail hybrid gear rarely has +hit, while rogue leather gear has loads.

So my 2 questions go pretty much together.

For example, on my server SSC/TK boots pattern are fairly cheap, and I really don't know if to go for Crimson Hawk or Utter Darkness (crimson got about 0.5% more crit and 27 int, while utter got 23 hit rating and slightly more AP)

I really recommend you get a WWS. It's much easier to see where people can improve when you can see there exact skill use.

Anyway, given your gear, ~600 dps seems to be okay across an entire run (if you're including the trash), but it's hard to tell. General checklist:

-T4 bonus? At your gear level, an extra 24 AP is very good.

-Do you have talented Battle Shout? ~380 AP is alot at any gear level.

-What Paladin buffs are you getting? Salv is virtually mandatory. BoM is usually the next best buff, giving 262 AP. BoK is also very good if you gear appropriately (I get 56 AP, ~1% crit from BoK).

-How often are you "attacking"? How does this compare with how long it takes you to reach each mob after a knockback/charge, how often are you healing?

-What debuffs are up? Sunder Armor? FF? CoE? Fire Vulnerability? Misery? I had a recent raid where we had no Fire Mage and no CoE. It meant I had to carefully monitor if the SS debuff was up or not to determine whether Flame Shock or Earth Shock was better.

-And mana issues? Is there ever a case where you can't shock due to mana problems? Are you keeping water shield up?

-Are you managing your totems? I use the PowerAura mod to ensure I'm always in range of my totems.

-Are you attacking the back of mobs? This negates their parry/block.

Honestly this would depend on the rest of your gear. But for overall DPS purposes I would probably go with Utter Darkness for the Hit and Attack Power. If you feel your weak on the Crit side of your gear the Crimson Hawk boots may be better for you. But, at least in my experience, I find that Crit seems to be easier to replace for us then good hit pieces.

This may be too specific for this thread.

This is the armory of an enhancement shaman in my guild.

Is what he is doing with his spec totally insane, as it appears to my untrained eye, or is there some kind of method to this madness?

He is wearing PVP gear from what I can see and using a 2 hander, if he is using this for PVE you may aswell gkick him.

I'm not sure I get where you're heading with your question, but to comment his gear/spec it feels like he has a PvP-Burst spec, and uses alot of vendor gems...

Not picking imp weapon totems is a reason to be shot if you're raiding in my opinion.

Has anyone got exalted with Ashtongue yet? I'm still about 2-3k away because I went on holiday and missed the trash farming for hearts.

Just wondering how the trinket was working out if anyone has it yet.

If he wants to DPS in PvE he should be dual-wielding.
Also since the shaman is there to buff his group, he should get Improved Weapon Totems.
Once he switches for DW, his spec should look something like this.

Yah he shouldn't be raiding with that spec, that's a build completely for PvP.

Thanks for the answers, he was trying to tell me that it was a legit PvE spec and I was just staring at him slackjawed.

Oh totally, Improved Fire Nova Totem and Ghost Wolf are must-have talents for Enhance Shaman that raid.

Note that its not the fact that he has points in elemental - there's plenty of enhance shaman that put points there, but its the fact that he's trying to 2H DPS (which means he will not be keeping Unleashed Rage up, DPS issues aside) and he skipped 2 of the 3 buffs to group totems that he could have picked up in the tree.

One thing I've been trying recently, and I haven't really seen it discussed anywhere, is totem weaving (not my name for it, but I like it). I basically use this macro:

I speced into both reduced totem cost and mental quickness and found that when everything is going right with procs and timing, I can sustain totem weaving + flame shock every 12 seconds indefinitely. If I run low on mana I can always just stop shocking or leave Windfury down until shamanistic rage is up again.

My group is almost always me, a warrior, and three rogues. Every so often we get a feral druid. I've gotten no reports of windfury going down while using this macro (when I started I asked my group to pay attention to it), and my group seems to like it quite a bit. I'm going off the assumption that the totem weaving alone would be more raid dps than me using that mana to spam shocks.

I was wondering if anyone had any insight into whether this is truly a good idea. Seems like a better alternative to the flame/earth shock rotation that seems to be the consensus.

Damn straight!

Its been discussed a few times. To be honest I'd never even heard of it (I think most people call it twisting) until the xpack and all the Alliance shaman were the ones pushing it forward. I've no intention of trying it out. I already feel like I'm waiting on GCD quite a bit and adding that twisting into a 10 second rotation is going to be crazy. Trying to fit 2 totem drops + 2 Shocks + SS into a 10 second period is going to fill the entire period with a GCD. The mana cost alone is enough to dissuade me without even thinking of the benefit - there's no way I could sustain dropping 2 totems every 10 seconds over a 10 minute fight.